Three Time’s the Charm: Boles Blogs is Freshly Pressed Again!

There’s nothing quite like the joy of being recognized by our respected peers for the work we spin and propagate into the wilds of the worldwide web, and when we received a welcome, and now more familiar, email last night telling us the great, good, news that our article of the day — Repressing the American Dream: Rural Villages as Retirement Communities for Young’uns — was the latest WordPress.com Freshly Pressed editor’s pick, we were shining in shadow:

Hi, David!

I hope your blog is ready to welcome some new readers — your post ( http://bolesblogs.com/2014/01/21/repressing-the-american-dream-rural-villages-as-retirement-communities-for-younguns/ ) will be featured on Freshly Pressed as a WordPress.com editors’ pick!

Another thought-provoking piece, as we’ve all come to expect from you — thanks. It’s a great post that deserves a wider audience.

FYI, you can now spread the good news by sharing the link http://discover.wordpress.com/, which lets anyone see the Freshly Pressed showcase whether or not they’re logged in to WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is the biggest and best blogging community because awesome bloggers like you make it the best. Thank you for publishing with us, and congrats! Have fun with your new readers.

Cheers,
michelle w.

What an honor to win Freshly Pressed a third time!

Our last win — Do You Remember Kaposi’s Sarcoma — was but seven months ago in June 2013 and we’re delighted to be back in the Freshly Pressed fold.

Our first win in July 2010 — American Folklore and the Blues Black Cat Bone —  still tingles with the thrill.

What is especially encouraging about getting your work recognized is that there’s a hard split waiting when it comes to social media and long form writing.  Are you an aging blogger or a social media troglodyte?  There isn’t any evolution involved.  You’re either a writer or a redactor and the world is heading more into the reductive image as a thousand words than the 140 character update setting the mind afire.

Winning Freshly Pressed confirms others still find particulate value in reading the longer page.

Sure, there are some things that now appear in the Boles Blogs Twitter stream on our sidebar that might have previously become full-length articles instead of tidbit updates, but that’s the magic of trying to combine incompatible memes in formation: Sometimes a shiver is just as effective as a sneeze.

The online world is moving away from links and text and more into the photo and the graphic — and Facebook actually now punishes you for sharing only contextual textual updates without some form of equal eyeball titillation:

Facebook said Tuesday that it is once again fudging with the formula behind News Feed. This time around, the social network warned Page owners that it would show their text-only status updates to a smaller number of their followers.’

“Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types,” News Feed Ranking Product Manager Chris Turitzin wrote in an announcement on the change.

When I share a Facebook social mesh update with an image, Facebook promotes that update in four times more news streams than they do when I just post an update with a link to my latest WordPress.com article.  That is both disheartening and understandable.

Facebook wants its members staying corralled in their site looking at images they host and they do not want their users clicking on a link to take them away to another domain to read something Facebook does not proprietarily control.

Being Freshly Pressed confirms that blogging — actually authoring ideas and arguments and placing them online for public consumption and inspection — is still the righteous way to keep the truth in play in the fallow fields of the living.

Some things can’t be argued in a text blurp or an image. Some things need context and framing and anticipation of the Art in the Object and the participation in the Viewer and the heavy lifting in the Creator in order to conform something more everlasting than a few characters spit out in a needle of time.

There are issues of the human condition that demand deeper study and thoughtful learning — and that’s the grand mission Freshly Pressed embeds: A refuge of ideas and dreams preserved over time in a relational substrate that exposes the all of us to each other in stark and naked and beautiful experiential truths that no image could ever define.